Margaret of Ashbury 03 - The Water Devil

by Judith Merkle Riley

  “You still call him Gregory?” asked Mother Hilde.“So do I, unless I remember. But Malachi knew him in their student days, so he's always called him Gilbert.”

  “I try to remember not to call him Gregory when I'm in company. He really doesn't want people remembering he was ever at the abbey—there's so much gossip, you know, and now his writing has put him in favor with the Duke—but it is the name I first knew him under—”

  “Ah well, it's worse with lords. Every time they get new lands, they're my lord something else.”

  “Certainly not our problem, Mother Hilde.” With a shout, Malachi stood suddenly, his round, pink face alight. “Eureka!” he cried.

  “That's Greek,” said Mother Hilde, looking pleased. “It means he's happy. Such a brilliant man, such a mind! He's even happy in other languages.”

  “Margaret,” he said, rounding the big brick athanor and approaching the window seat, “this recipe is a hash. I've come to the conclusion the letter is a code. Gilbert wrote it to evade the censors.”

  “Exactly my thought—but is he all right? Does he say when he'll be home?”

  “I'm coming to that, I'm coming to that. The key is alchemical— that, and certain common turns of phrase based on our long acquaintance. It is a code decodable only by me.” Malachi extended the letter and pointed to the recipe. “You see here? Gold stands for the king, and the conversion of the plain cloth to making France ours. Now, here, where the gold precipitates out in solution—that means the king has lost, Margaret, and is coming home. Let's see, full moon in Aries—yes, some disaster, fairly recently—” “But is Gregory coming home? When? Does he say?” “Here—let's see. Ah, the devil! He knows I always used to call them Gemini. So rude of him! Hmm, yes. Mercury, the metal of Gemini. With luck, Margaret, he'll be home in late May or early June. Now here's an interesting thing, Margaret—he seems to be saying that even if the army didn't do well, he's made some money. I wonder how? He always was an ingenious chap. Even in marrying you, Margaret. Well, I don't think you have to worry about that box in the chest much longer, except for searching out a new hiding place, where those children can't find it.”

  But in the midst of joy, another worry stabbed through my mind like a lance. “Malachi? Does he say anything about his older brother and his father returning home, too? Pray God he gets here before them, or it's more than the cash box I'll have to hide. Lord, lord, keep that awful family of his all penned up at Brokesford at least until I've had time alone with him.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  WHAT ON EARTH IS KEEPING OLD Peter so long? They saw them feeding here only yesterday.” Impatiently, the Lord of Brokesford flicked away a fragment of pigeon pie that had fallen on the worn and greasy bosom of his old leather hunting coat. The offending remnant of pie was still in his hand; he avoided further mishaps by downing it at a gulp. Newly returned from France, directly returned to his estates without incident, and happily returned with all his limbs intact and both sons living, he felt especially blessed. God had clearly willed it all, it was obviously a reward for his virtue, and he felt filled with the contentment that comes from a sense of righteous deserving.

  It was pink dawn, an excellent English dawn and not one of those dank, inferior, foreign ones such as he had seen entirely too many of on the march to Calais. From the clouds the night before, from the signs of the birds, of the stars, it promised to be fair. English sun, English grass, and English cooking—all better. He surveyed his little universe with the eye of a man who knows that he is lord of everything that counts. Cloths had been spread on the dewy grass of the meadow beside a meandering stream. Arrayed on the cloths were the plentiful dishes of a hunt breakfast being consumed by Sir Hubert, his family members, neighbors, and guests. Grooms held the saddled horses and the impatient hounds. All were waiting for the return of the old lord's chief huntsman and finest scent hound, who were trailing the herd of red deer from this, their last grazing spot, to the place where they now fed. A little tent of twigs marked the place where the stag had fed, there among the does and fawns. It was this scent that Old Peter and Bruno were following; today they would hunt the stag.

  “Ah, this air. There's no better spice for a dish,” said Sir William Beaufoy, Sir Hubert's old comrade-in-arms and guest of honor. He had not paid a visit to Brokesford Manor since long before the campaign; indeed, since their last adventure together, a little matter of devising a scheme for ransoming Sir Hubert's youngest, and most ungrateful, son from captivity in France.

  “It will do you good to get away from the close air of the court. As for me, I feel a new man when I'm away from that harping shrew with whom I'm forced to dwell.” Sir Geoffroi, the old lord's nearest neighbor, helped himself to a large slice of smoked ham as he spoke. At these words, Sir Hugo, eldest son and heir of the Lord of Brokesford, cast a sharp glance at his wife, Lady Petronilla, who had made her views most clear on being forced to retreat from the delights of the Duke's court. She avoided the look, staring coldly into the distance.

  Not for Sir Hugo the battered, comfortable old garments of his elders. In the manner of a French aristocrat, he sported a jewel on his black beaver hat and a brown velvet hunting surcoat of the latest cut. His wife, too, had put off her long black gown for a new riding habit in mossy green, and wore a little dagger at her belt beside her hunting horn. Adept with the bow and arrow, she was a woman who loved blood sports, and rode well enough to never miss the “mort,” the death of the prey. Jolly her up a little, thought Hugo. Some hunts, a little night sport, and she'll soon be pregnant again. For as long as his brain could fix on anything, he contemplated his loss. Why should everything go to his younger brother's son, just because he'd run off with some woman of the lower orders who bred like a rabbit? Irritating, irritating it was. Petronilla needed to do her duty, and quickly, too. Well, at least he knew now she wasn't barren.

  “Surely, there must be some good in this woman. Can she cook?” responded the tactful Sir William.

  “Cooking's all very well,” responded Sir Geoffroi.“But it all turns to poison in the stomach with the interfering. She interferes with my steward, she interferes with my stable, she knows my business better than I do, according to her. And quarrel with my wife? I tell you there's no end to it. Two mistresses under one roof—a recipe for trouble if I ever heard one. And under the conditions of my brother's will, I can't be rid of her.”

  “Ah, I see, she's your elder brother's wife?”

  “Exactly, and with right to a room, board and keep, two gowns a year, a full supply of candles, freedom of the household, and freedom to interfere to her heart's content! By God, I wish I could wall her up in that room, but then that ghastly lawyer her niece married would be down on me like a wolf on a lamb. Oh, he'd love the excuse to worry me out of my property.”

  “Lawyers, there's no END to 'em!” Sir Hubert began to shout. “A PLAGUE of lawyers has descended on us, a PLAGUE, I SAY, to EAT HONEST MEN OUT OF HOUSE AND HOME! Their GRASPING HANDS ARE EVERYWHERE, with their—”

  “I do believe I saw otter tracks just over there,” interrupted Sir William, gesturing with a cold chicken leg to the reedy bank. Only quick action could distract Sir Hubert from one of his famous fulminations. The trick, his old friend knew, was to stop the early storm clouds before they had blown together. Once at gale force, the storm would cause the budding leaves to shrivel and living creatures to flee. The old lord in a fit of passion might even give up the stag and mount an expedition against the some local justice's house instead. Already, the rustling of field mice and water voles in the grass had stopped. It was time to defy the rules of courtesy for the greater good.

  “Otters, no hunt for gentlemen,” announced Sir Hugo. “Why, when I was in France, the lords there left them for the peasants to trap.” The superior tone in his voice caused his old sire to glare at him. Glaring at him reminded him of the ridiculous French hunting garb his son had affected. And that reminded him of his heir's irritating habit of spouting godawful French verse
at every rose and female form within ten miles. As far as Sir Hubert of Brokesford was concerned, the entire French invasion had been a disaster—the Brokesford stud stripped, no more than half a dozen suits of rather badly dented armor captured for resale, no ransoms of note, and most unspeakable, the corruption of good English morals with fancy, sickly foreign ideas.

  “Otters, hate 'em,” growled the Lord of Brokesford. “They got into my fishpond this Lent, and just before I returned on Saint Benet's day they ate the big eel I'd been saving.”

  “If you ask me,” said Sir Roger, a pink-faced, high-living fellow who was “Sir” by courtesy, being the parish priest, “that otter had ten good fingers and went on two feet.” Lady Petronilla, Sir Hugo's wife, gave Sir Roger a cold, narrow-eyed stare, which did not escape Sir William's shrewd eye. Hmm, he thought. I think Sir Roger's hit it. She had it cooked up while he was away from home, and blamed the otters. When the cat's away, the mice will play…. Here's another place the conversation must be headed off.

  “This coppice beyond the meadow here I know is yours, but the woods there beyond the rise, are they all in your demesne, or are they divided between you and your good neighbor here? I've never really had it clear.” Sir William gestured again with the remains of the chicken leg.

  “Ah, don't probe there, that's a sore spot,” said Sir Geoffroi. “There's a fine stand of ancient oaks on the other side that some lawyer from Hertford claims he has bought title to.”

  “Title indeed. There's no title if the land was not for sale, and it's NOT! Those oaks have been in the family since the first of us was listed in the Domesday book. I tell you, a de Vilers does not sell old oaks to the highest bidder! My grandfather, I say, my very grandfather, tithed six of them for the cathedral roof, and was never the same afterward. Do you think I'd ever see them SOLD to MERCHANTS for their despicable WAREHOUSES? If that shady friar hadn't cast doubts on the title, I swear that LAWYER would not have DARED—”

  “Oh, look yonder, isn't that Old Peter I see?” said Sir William, putting a restraining hand on his friend's shoulder. Sure enough, the figure striding from a coppice planted thick with hazel and young oaks was indeed Old Peter, who was not in fact old at all, but merely older than Young Peter, his son, who held a half-dozen greyhounds at the side of the assistant huntsman.

  “The stag, by God, he's found him! Humph, this stag, I've been saving him for you. A noble beast. Would that he and the lawyer could change places. THEN we'd have a HUNT!”

  THEY APPROACHED THE HERD upwind, but the sound of the dogs sent the deer scattering for the forest. Urged on by their groom, the loosed greyhounds cut off the stag, sending him bounding across the scrub wasteland and into the rolling, newly plowed and seeded fields of the tiny village of Hamsby, the farthest outpost of the Lord of Brokesford's demesne. At the sight of the stag, the little boys posted to keep away the birds fled. Followed by the yelping hounds, the stag darted across the plowed strips, followed by galloping horses that sent the dirt clods flying. Then as quickly as it had come, the traveling disaster passed, save for stragglers called across the wreckage by the horns in the distance. A flock of rooks settled in the churned up dirt, and the little boys ran again to the fields to throw stones at them.

  Among the beeches at the edge of the forest, the stag splashed up the stream for a distance to throw the dogs off the scent. The hunt paused until Old Peter's horn from deep among the trees told them the scent had been found again. In the van, the old lord and Sir William crashed through the underbrush and into the deep woods behind Bruno. For centuries here the foresters had culled the lesser trees; in this place nothing but the twisted limbs of ancient oak trees scratched the sky. But the horses had easy footing; beneath the budding, new leafed branches, the ground had been picked clear of every twig and fallen branch by peasants in search of fuel, though it was death to touch the trees themselves. They passed a clearing, cut in two by the stream, here only a brook, and Bruno lost the scent again. Still on the trail of the stag, they rode up the brook and into the forest depths again, while Bruno searched the banks for the lost scent.

  “What is this place?” asked Sir William. They had reached the head of the brook, a spring like a deep rocky pond, save at the center, where from an unknowable depth, green water roiled and bubbled as if in a boiling cauldron. Beside the spring, an immense rock stood, with a cord wrapped around it several times. From the cord, bits of rag hung, some bleached white with age. But strangest of all, the spring was located at the end of a kind of house created entirely of the thick, dark trunks of living yew trees planted in two rows the same distance apart as pillars that would support the nave of a great cathedral. The vast age of these dark pillars was unguessable. Their interwoven, eternally green tops formed a heavy, hedge-like roof, denser than thatch. The strange tree-building cast a heavy black shadow that seemed even more eerie among the airy branches and dappled shade of the surrounding oaks. For some reason, it reminded Sir William of a graveyard, and a cold chill went up his spine.

  “They say there's a spirit here in the water,” said Sir Hubert, lifting his horn to call the rest of the hunt. “Some old nixie called Hretha, who grants wishes. But it also makes excellent beer.” From the forest behind them, the calling horns and baying hounds responded, and the first riders crashed out of the woods into the strange clearing.

  “Where's Old Peter?”

  “We've lost the scent.”

  “Trust the beast to hide here, of all places,” said the Lord of Brokesford manor.

  “New rags, new rags, in spite of all I tell them,” Sir Roger announced in a disgusted voice, riding his bay cob around the big rock.

  “And just what is that?” asked Sir William, his curiosity aroused.

  “When the blessed Saint Edburga rested here, this spring opened up in the ground at the very place her head lay. Do you see the ruins of that holy hermitage there? Look closely at the stones, and you will see the representation of her holy martyrdom.” Sir William noticed tumbled rocks, cut square, beyond the strange green, tree columned hall. From one of the rocks, the badly worn image of a skull peered back at him. This was no holy hermitage, thought Sir William, taking a deep breath. Something ancient was here. Something pagan. He shuddered and crossed himself. “The hermitage was dedicated to the blessed head of Saint Edburga, but as you see, it has fallen into decay.”

  “Yes, indeed, that I see. What a pity,” said Sir William.

  “Only in church will prayers to God almighty and to Saint Edburga be answered, but they persist in making offerings here to some ridiculous pagan water devil, and deny the saint her candles. Folk superstition! Nothing good will come of it!” The hunting priest was indignant. The hounds were busy smelling the ground around the spring. The horses and riders milled about, waiting for the dogs to pick up the stag's trail again.

  “What do they want?” asked the visitor. Lady Petronilla had pushed her gray mare closer to the conversation. She, too, knew little of local traditions, for her father's estates were in the south, and she used every excuse possible to avoid long residence at Brokesford.

  “Wishes, vain wishes. The rock, they say, is alive. As for the spring, there's an evil spirit there that grants unholy desires. Barren women, especially, come here, though I have threatened them with excommunication. Walk three times around the spring sunwards, and make an offering.” Petronilla leaned forward for a better view of the green, boiling depths, her heavily ringed hand clutched deep into her mare's mane. Her breath was hard, and her blue eyes glittered like chips of ice.

  “And in what way is the rock alive?” asked Sir William.

  “Oh, once a year on Midsummer Night it is said to wade into the water to drink, though no one has ever seen it. Also, it weeps. If it's chipped, they say, it will bleed, but there's a curse on anyone who tries it, so they leave it alone. Those rags are offerings.”

  “Why, it's nothing but an oversized wishing well. I've half a mind to try it out. Besides, a man can't have too much good lu
ck,” said Sir William, half relieved by the explanation. “Sir Hubert, watch this.” He fished in the bag at his belt and came up with a quarter farthing.

  “Find us that scent; I crave venison tonight,” he said, and flipped the shining quarter circle into the water. From the distance, Old Peter's horn sounded. The hounds that had crowded around the horses ran off, yelping, around the fallen stones and into the woods. The first to follow them was Petronilla, spurring her horse away from the water- side as if scalded. Sir Hubert paused only to signal any stragglers with his own horn, then followed the fast vanishing hunt into the forest.

  It was not more than an hour before the “mort” was ringing in the afternoon air. One long, three shorts, pause, one long, three shorts again to mark the stag coughing blood from a mortal swordthrust. As the apprentice huntsmen cut a pole to carry home the stag's quarters, the grooms butchered the creature according to unchanging traditional ritual, first cutting off the testicles and tongue, then cutting away the shoulders, then emptying out the liver and entrails. Hounds gobbled the scraps that were fed to them; a new apprentice was “blooded,” marked in the stag's gore. Dame Petronilla looked on with glowing eyes, her hand tight on the hilt of her little knife. Red puddled into the earth, red stained the butchers' hands and arms. At last the quarters, strung to the pole, were taken up for the return to the manor kitchen.

  Far from the bloody ground, the green water bubbled mindlessly, alone beneath the sheltering arch of the ancient yews, where the birds were silent.

  CHAPTER SIX

  IN THE MONTH OF MAY, BIRDS SING AND SO do all the street sellers and beggars: the hot pie man sings “hot pies, hot PIES, so fine,” right up and down the street, and the blind woman by the church sings, “for the LOVE of CHRIST, a FAR-thing only, have PI-ty” as she rocks back and forth, and wandering down the back alleys where he can be heard by housewives hanging out their wash, the man with the string of dead rats tied by the tail sings the most tunefully of all: “I'm the RAT catcher, I'm the RA-A-A-T catcher.” Then there's baaing and the clank of milk pails as the goat woman comes with her goats and calls out at our kitchen door for our order, and the singing of the woman who bears duck eggs on her head in a basket, who does a good custom in this neighborhood. I tell you, you can hardly even hear the birds for all the noise. The fine day had brought them all out, birds and human singers and dogs and grunting pigs, and the cacophony all came floating in through the open kitchen shutters, mingling with the busy chicken sound from our little henyard and the sound of Master Wengrave's big sorrel mule braying.